


Not Just A Plot Device

by bossy



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide Attempt, Vietnam War, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 13:56:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bossy/pseuds/bossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You never fought in a war, not really; you were lost in the peripherals; you watched it from the sidelines; it surrounded you. You’re with your husband the first time he kills and he’s shaking, he’s lost; you’re not with your son but you see it bearing down on him, suffocating him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Just A Plot Device

Back then, you would’ve said you didn’t know anything about war. You didn’t know why it was okay for people to die for something abstract, for something the government wanted so badly it’d sacrifice it’s own people for it. Even with your dad gone and his plight all over the TV screens, you don’t know what they’re doing in ‘Nam.

But war built up in you, like years of standing in the sun that grew slowly into skin cancer. War built up in you until you were defined by it, until you tell the kids at school you’re a military family, that’s why you move so much. The red boxes under your name on TV call you, military widow. Military mother. Soldier of the resistance. Three dead, seventeen wounded. You’re the wounded, and your son’s girlfriend, she’s the dead.

–

Summer of ’69, your dad comes home shell-shocked, saying “yessir” automatically. Your dad comes home and starts making your bed too fast, sheets stretched too tight, no wrinkles anywhere. Your dad comes home, and nobody likes him.

You know it’s wrong, the war, you know deep down he shouldn’t have gone and nobody should’ve died. After he’s drafted, you’re glued to the TV, you know who he’s killed and where and why, you know about trenches and gunshot wounds and amputations. You know about camouflage and hidden bombs blasting unsuspecting men into pieces. You know about men going down to some tiny, middle-of-nowhere village and shooting everyone, killing everyone’s wives and children and people who never did anything.

Maybe nobody ever did anything.

But when your dad comes back and sits awake all night hunched over in a chair in the kitchen, staring and staring and staring while the refrigerator hums on and off, you can’t blame him. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do, but after he got the letter, he didn’t have a choice.

You never fought in a war, not really; you were lost in the peripherals; you watched it from the sidelines; it surrounded you. You’re with your husband the first time he kills and he’s shaking, he’s lost; you’re not with your son but you see it bearing down on him, suffocating him.

You never fought in a war, but every moment, you’re stuck in the middle of one.

–

You learn when you’re young that nobody’s perfect; everyone’s broken, in one way or another. People who think they’re immune, they’re just sheltered. Nothing’s hurt them yet.

When you’re young, your dad leaves you and never looks back. Some years he sends your mom Christmas cards with pictures of him smiling in the middle of some other family, but he’s distant, he doesn’t belong to you anymore. Sometimes you cry, but deep down, you know it’s not his fault. Under all the pressure, he collapsed.

Under all the pressure, you’re dropping your son off at your sister’s and he’s watching you, eyes wide, seconds away from tears. Gripping the wheel tight, watching him bawling in the rearview mirror, you lie to yourself, thinking: he’ll have a good life. Under the pressure, you tell yourself, he’s better off without me.

Things are only perfect when we’re not watching. Look right at them, and they’ll crumble.

–

The thing you shouldn’t have done was be brave. The thing you shouldn’t have done was walk into danger’s way head-first, heady, gripping your key in your pocket like a weapon. The thing you shouldn’t have done was try to rescue the boy, screaming and sniffling and terrified, who later bound and gagged you, kicked you off a three-foot platform like you were nothing.

If you weren’t there, Earth would’ve been a speck, some middle-of-nowhere planet not even put on the maps yet. If you weren’t there, the enemy wouldn’t have gotten the prize they needed, wouldn’t have promoted the man who turned into a monster. If you weren’t there, maybe nobody would’ve died.

The thing you don’t want to admit is, you’d do it again.

–

The closest thing you ever have to normal is something that isn’t. Something that starts in a nightmare and ends as a nightmare, haunting the space behind your eyes at night and making you wake up gasping, disoriented, clicking on the light and making sure nothing’s lurking in the shadows. Locking your doors and windows and staring up at the stars through the skylight every night, entwining your fingers through his. This is all you have, the two of you, and it’s all too clear you could lose that any minute.

Just because you’re away from the fighting, away from the corruption and the exploitation and the confusion, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. Just because you have the down payment on a house, because you went to church and made it official and your mother cried, your sister laughed and clapped you on the back and went outside for a smoke, that doesn’t mean anything. Any minute, they could come back for you.

Just because you’re pregnant, maybe, hopefully, that doesn’t mean your son will grow up free. Doesn’t mean they won’t torture him until he bleeds, won’t kill the only person who meant anything to him and leave him alone, drawn in on himself, gone far worse than your dad was gone.

Nothing here is real. Everything is an illusion.

–

It’s the secret that everyone knows, the conversation topic everyone is polite enough to avoid: years ago, you almost died, you drove your car off the highway overpass on Interstate 105 and your head smashed through the dashboard, and you came back different.

Death (almost-death, half-death), it’s not the first thing that hurts you. It’s the thing that saves you, the glue that’s holding your scarred body together. When you’re broken, nobody looks at you like you know any secrets, like maybe you were there when this started.

Like maybe you’re not the reason this started, like maybe you weren’t the first sacrifice. Like maybe you weren’t what he was trying to come home to when he crash landed, bleeding and dying and looking for the secrets the both of you buried.

Hurt, like this, you’re off the radar. You’re not human, the way the enemy’s never human because it’d hurt too much to realize they are. You’re invisible.

–

They give you the weapon late, swoop you out of your home as a last resort when the resistance is worn down to the bone, scrapped and torn and guilty. The leader, your only hope, he’s just a kid, thinner than he should be, black bags under his eyes and frown lines on his face, pacing around the campground in worn-out army boots instead of resting.

You use it, once, without thinking. You get in the line of fire for your son, you’re shot down, and you think, this is it. This is death. This is how to make up for that other death, that first death, where you died and left him alone. This is all your life will ever mean.

You put your weapon away, after that. Murder in your blood, that’s something that never goes away.

–

Giving birth to your son, being one of the few fighters clustered around a campfire shivering and dirty and trying not to give up, that never goes away, either.

You didn’t do anything, you haven’t done anything except for the murky glimmer of a twenty-year-old memory, pressing painful against your temples, but they don’t treat you like that. They treat you like everything was on your shoulders. They treat you like this is a good thing, that it doesn’t hurt you every day that your son’s missing. They treat you like you can help, when really maybe you’re more lost than they are. When they have each other, and all you have is a microphone in your face asking questions you can’t answer.

–

It’s bittersweet, when they call him a hero. At first, when you don’t remember him, don’t remember the week you spent together lost and scared and alone, you think he left you. You think he left you struggling on welfare in the kind of neighborhood where you hear gunshots, left your son without anybody to take care of him, and you don’t want to hear about him anymore.

You’re making small talk with a man who gave himself up to save his daughter, who is very proud of you and your son and is sincerely sorry for your loss, and you recognize his eyes. You recognize the scared boy who tied you up with rope, tossed you off a platform.

It doesn’t happen all at once, but you get yourself back, after that, and this is a big deal to the press. They want to know everything, every little detail, they’re drawn to the scandal. You don’t talk, because they don’t really care. They don’t care that underneath the man who shot the most dead, made the most headlines, there was someone gentle. There was someone who didn’t want to fight, not really. There was someone who maybe only wanted to come home.

–

Tracing down your temple where the scars are–-where they’re not, anymore, but you still feel them phantom-painful jutting out underneath your fingertips–-you say, “I didn’t die like I wanted, but it was close enough. When you have a head injury like that, you’re not really alive.”

Tracing the scars (jagged and twisting down your face, into your eye socket, bursts of scar tissue and exposed nerves), it makes them hurt even though they’re gone, suddenly takes you away. You forget where you are; closing your eyes to make the room black, you’re half-dead, IV tugging at your arm and that pulsing, horrific pain in your head.

Open your eyes and you’re half-back, half-aware. You say, “It’s the first thing I remember.”

Even afterward, when your memories started to fit together like an old jigsaw puzzle with all the edges torn up and stubborn, they’re not linear. Everything starts and ends in that hospital.

The guy at the bar, he’s saying, “That’s really deep, good story. Deep. You should do something with that.”

He says, “Make it into a movie.”

You don’t tell him, you’re already in a movie, played by an actress who is young and thin and celebrity-gorgeous. You have one line.

After the accident, you’re alone. The other brain injury patients are nothing like you, they’re muddled, saying they know the meaning of life, they’re finding salvation shaking cups on street corners for meth money. Saying you should join them, because you’re special. You’re smart, for a girl who had amnesia so deep she had to learn how to count to ten. Without the scars, you’d be pretty. One guy, you hear he writes your name on his wall in his own blood, and even after they put him in jail, you’re listening for the hollow rhythm of his footsteps behind you. For nights after, you can’t sleep, phone huddled under the covers with you, fingers tracing 9-1-1.

But you’re not like him; you’re fine except for the dreams you have. You’re such a success story they don’t want to hear from you anymore. Nothing’s wrong with you. Your MRI results were normal, your vitals are fine. You’re discharged. We don’t need to see you again. Go home.

When they say go home, they mean, sell your house to pay off the money for the ER and the surgeries and the brain scans and the anti-depressants, the anti-psychotic medications that make you paranoid. Your sister, sister-in-law, whatever she is to you, she’s never the same after.

Cleaning out the house before you sell it, she says, too slowly, “Why would you write a suicide note if it was an accident?”

You ask, “I wrote a what?”

You trip over something on the floor. You lean down and pick it up, carefully: it’s a plastic mug with protection over the top, small hole for drinking out of. You think, for the baby.

She says, “Don’t play dumb, I know you remember.”

Voice rising, she says, “I can’t believe you wanted to dump your kid on me all along, now you’re taking my fucking house.”

She doesn’t come to see you at the new house you pay for with your disability benefits, where you stay inside all day long some days because outside, you’ll hear gunshots. Outside, you’ll get jostled, groped, spit on. Your cane gets taken from you at park benches. 

You tell the hospital, “I want a really big dog.”

The dog’s a good idea. Guiding him to crawl up under the first row of seats on the bus, a voice next to you says, “What’s his name?” Says, “My mom’s blind too, she runs the support group down in the library Tuesday nights. You should come.”

You didn’t know there was a support group. Didn’t know there was a library. Is today Tuesday? You’ve stopped keeping track.

You’re nervous at first, you know you’re not like them, you’re just an empty shell where there used to be a person-–but for some reason, they like you at the support group. You carve out a life going to their houses, learning to cook, learning to check out books on tape. You don’t tell them about the baby, don’t tell them you’re delusional and at night you dream in vision, dream in color, you dream about seeing Earth from space.

You never say this out loud, but without a past, you’re nobody. Even now, you’re nobody. They interview you every once in a while, saying “you’re obviously a very strong woman to have overcome everything you did”–-everyone calls you that, strong, when you’re not–-but that’s not what they’re interested in. 

USA Today: Your son must be taking this very hard.

In the movie, you’re just a plot device. You don’t cry, don’t apologize. They cut out everything meaningful, everything that made you distinct and maybe even sympathetic, and all you are is some woman in a low-cut T-shirt and designer sunglasses who abandoned her son. Your one line is, “Let’s go.”

USA Today: Tell us what their relationship was like. They obviously cared deeply for each other.

The actress who played your part says, “It was a difficult role to play. Originally the character was blind, so I studied blindness for weeks.”

USA Today: But of course, we’d be nowhere without your husband and his noble sacrifice for humanity. Tell us everything about him. You must miss him.

In the end, you run away from it too. Your husband’s dead, your son who you never really knew is as good as dead, your old friend gets shot dead. The other parents don’t talk to you, anymore; you’re just the one who abandoned her son, the one who left him beat-up and ignored and fragile.

In the scheme of things, that’s all you’ll ever be.

**Author's Note:**

> Reading this over, I can tell it was inspired by "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, and also by Chuck Palahniuk.


End file.
